She started an online boutique in her mid-30s called The French Gypsy featuring her own whimsical clothing designs. In a 2014 Panama City Living magazine article she gave all the credit to her mother, Alice. She called her “a sewing artist.”

Sewing wasn’t the only thing the pretty fair-haired girl from Georgia came to learn and love from her family. From an early age, Mary Lee gardened. Her father Leroy tilled her own little plot outside the kitchen door where radishes and lettuce flourished. She canned vegetables and as she grew up, cultivated flowers.

Mary Lee loved fishing. It was a past time nurtured by her dad that she shared with her younger brother John. She was a Brownie and a Girl Scout. She loved to curl up and read.

Mary Lee Versemann Gray(Photo: Special to the Democrat)

Later, the woman who had fun experimenting with fashion and coloring her hair fell in love with the beach. She’d comb the white Panhandle sand for shells on morning walks with her coffee cup. She swam with a dolphin and her blue eyes beamed.

Mary Lee met the love of her life, Jack, when she was just 18. Their 20-year age difference didn’t matter. They were like swans. No children, but together, for life.

“They just fell in love, and that was that,” her mother said. “She had a good life and she had a full life.”

I learned all these things from Alice, who cold-called me this month, a couple of weeks after a Leon County jury convicted a man named Rickey Stevens for killing Mary Lee. A judge, after hearing Alice’s stark and poignant victim impact statement, sentenced him to 52 years in prison.

That’s the story I read in the newspaper the day after she died. In my paper, with information gleaned from a terse police news release and a just-the-facts law enforcement recitation of why the man who murdered her should be arrested.

Last month, I quickly edited the short update we published when Mary Lee’s killer was found guilty. It was noted in the paper, for the record.

“I know she was doing wrong, but it didn’t excuse someone shooting her in the head,” Alice scolded me the first time we talked. “My daughter didn’t deserve to die.”

Last year, in this small city, more than 20 homicides were reported, an all-time high. At this small newspaper, with one dedicated crime reporter, we lack the resources to tell all the stories that need telling.

It’s no excuse. Which is why when Alice called me righteously furious about the Democrat’s one-dimensional coverage of her daughter’s death I took my lumps. I listened, apologized and took her number.

Alice belongs to a club no mother ever wants to join – that of parents whose children are killed. The story of her only daughter deserved better telling. I knew within seconds of hearing her voice the responsibility was mine.

On Tuesday evening, I called Alice back.

“I understand a lot of it, but I don’t understand a lot of it, does that make sense?” she tried to explain. “This has been hard for me to accept how this turned out because I knew her in a different way. We had her for 40 years, and just suddenly, she is gone.”

To start to understand how Mary Lee ended up that Sunday night at the Leon Arms apartments – in a sketchy part of town known as The Bottoms – you need to go back about 10 years.

That’s when she was diagnosed with a type of multiple sclerosis called trigeminal neuralgia that caused burning nerve pain in her face. The treatment that began with shots of prescription painkillers led her down a dead-end path to street drugs.

Mary Lee Versemann Gray (left) and her mother Alice.(Photo: Special to the Democrat)

Alice and Mary Lee used to talk every morning. They’d drink their coffee together over the phone, Alice in Thomaston, Georgia, and Mary Lee, first in Mexico Beach, then Panama City, and for the last three years in Tallahassee, where Jack, her husband, landed a good job selling cars.

By fall 2016, however, Mary Lee became harder to reach. That October, Alice decided to make the four-hour drive from her home just south of Atlanta to see her daughter in person.

“I knew something was desperately wrong, I just didn’t know what it was,” Alice recalled. “People are so good at hiding it.”

Mary Lee was losing her battle with addiction. She was trying to get clean – she volunteered to be a CI because she wanted to help stop drug dealers from preying on people – but a low moment would come and she’d go back to using.

“When I left there, I thought, ‘That’s the last time I’m going to see my daughter,’” Alice told me. “And that was the last time.”

Mary Lee Versemann Gray(Photo: Special to the Democrat)

Jack did everything he could to stop her. (“He would have turned the moon into swiss cheese for her,” Alice said.) The night of her murder she’d come home with crack cocaine. He begged her not to do it.

Crying, he brought her into the bathroom and showed her their reflection in the mirror.

“Look what you are doing,” he recounted at trial last month. "You are killing us.”

When he fell asleep that January night, she took his keys. Police officers found her in the bullet-riddled Nissan SUV. A friend who was with her ran off and left her alone.

Alice did see her baby girl one more time. She was on a metal table at the Fairview Funeral Home in a white body bag.

When I asked Alice to see photos of her daughter, she directed me to her online obituary page where there is a nearly nine-minute-long video of family snapshots put to music. I listened to the gospel song "Angels in the Room" and Whitney Houston singing "I Will Always Love You," as I watched Mary Lee's life go by.

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Jennifer Portman(Photo: Hali Tauxe/Democrat)

The baby pictures. The posed shots in the 70's wood-paneled family room. School portraits, on Santa's lap, with her dogs, all dressed up in satin dresses, joking with her husband - and that one from the time she swam with the dolphin. So many special captured moments.

In the last one, Mary Lee is sitting cross-legged, smiling, with one of her beloved schnauzers. She looks relaxed and happy.

“I had a beautiful daughter," Alice said before we hung up the phone. "I hope you think she is too."